Basically what it says on the tin. I have this psychological need to find a really intense structured organization to help me accomplish what I want in life (most importantly, saving the world), and EA organizations are natural candidates for this. However, most of the large ones I’ve found display too much “performative normalcy” and aren’t really willing to be as hardcore as I want and need.
Any recommendations on where to find a hardcore totalizing community that can inject more structure into my life so I’m better equipped to save the world? I’m living in Boston for the next two years or so, so anything that requires moving somewhere else won’t work, but other than that, all kinds of ideas are welcome.
EA group house?
Tech startup incubator?
Research bootcamp, e.g. MATS?
Thanks for the advice. I was more wondering if there was some specific organization that was known to give that sort of environment and was fairly universally recognized as e.g. “the Navy SEALs of EA” in terms of intensity, but this broader advice sounds good too.
I think this is a joke, but for those who have less-explicit feelings in this direction:
I strongly encourage you to not join a totalizing community. Totalizing communities are often quite harmful to members and being in one makes it hard to reason well. Insofar as an EA org is a hardcore totalizing community, it is doing something wrong.
This was semi-serious, and maybe “totalizing” was the wrong word for what I was trying to say. Maybe the word I more meant was “intense” or “serious.”
CLARIFICATION: My broader sentiment was serious, but my phrasing was somewhat exaggerated to get my point across.
What you’re asking for sounds risky; see here for a reflection from a former “hardcore” EA. I also imagine there aren’t many really hardcore segments after the fall of Leverage Research, but I have no particular insight into that.
Thanks for the reflection.
I’ve read about Leverage, and it seems like people are unfairly hard on it. They’re the ones who basically started EA Global, and people don’t give them enough credit for that. And honestly, even after what I’ve read about them, their work environment still sounds better to me than a supposedly “normal” one.
Yes, they were involved in the first, small, iteration of EAG, but their contributions were small compared to the human capital that they consumed. More importantly, they were a high-demand group that caused a lot of people serious psychological damage. For many, it has taken years to recover a sense of normality. They staged a partial takeover of some major EA institutions. They also gaslit the EA community about what they were doing, which confused and distracted decent-sized subsections of the EA communtiy for years.
I watched The Master a couple of months ago, and found to be a simultaneously compelling and moving description of the experience of cult membership, that I would recommend.
I agree with a broad gist of this comment, but I think this specific sentence is heavily underselling Leverage’s involvement. They ran the first two EA Summits, and also were heavily involved with the first two full EA Globals (which I was officially in charge of, so I would know).